1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of coordinating schedule entries in multiple electronic calendars and more specifically, to formatting a calendar request from a format of a source to a format of the target.
2. Description of the Related Art
Among office workers, for example, technical, administrative, and sales staff, there has been a growing trend to operate at sites other than that of the employer. Visits to clients can be of varying durations and often may last months. Consequently, such workers may have access to a client's computer network and be given permissions and logins for standard office software, including calendaring tools.
Typically, this means that the itinerant worker, sometimes called a contractor, has multiple bosses to whom she should report. Often the basic calendaring tools used at the client's offices vary from those used by the employer. This means that it is often necessary for the worker to allocate time on a client's calendaring system and then login to the employer's calendaring system and redundantly enter the same meeting details. The problem is exacerbated if the worker has, in addition, a personal organizer or home computer on which a calendar is hosted.
In addition, there are groups of people who frequently need to orchestrate meetings across several organizations. These include venture capitalists, diplomats, industry standard constituents, among others. One way to electronically mediate invitations to meetings is to describe the meeting details in the body of an email in straightforward English. Though this is a fairly universal language in the business world, it still means a lot of redundant human keystrokes to allocate the timed event in each recipient's calendar tool.
In recent years, a standard called the iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol has been proposed in Request For Comments (RFC) 2446, of the internet engineering task force. The protocol is based on messages sent from an originator to one or more recipients. The iCalendar feature does not provide for a way to be backwards compatible with proprietary calendar software, vis-à-vis meeting invitations and synchronizing scheduled events.
In addition, Lotus Notes® copies a server copy of a calendar replicated with a local copy on a predefined schedule. The replication is a form of synchronization and can be done with an arbitrary number of clients. This replication only supports multiple instances of the same calendar system and does not support synchronization between disparate calendar systems made by different manufacturers.
Thus, it would be helpful to provide a mechanism by which a user may, in an ad hoc manner, update an event on a calendar in which the user is currently logged and send a synchronization event to another calendar system to which the user is entitled to update.